I did not know much about
Valentines day when I was very young. Did some of my friends know?
But I think it is a "thing" that will go on, because it
makes good business to the shops and (maybe still) the post
office.

In a Norwegian newspaper I read that the
post office had introduced this tradition in Norway.

Here it is now very popular,
specially amongst the young ones, but they mostly uses their
mobile phones.

The flower shops were lucky
today that the ferry came so they got fresh flowers for the
Valentines Day, - many gives flowers to their loved ones.

Make love, not war ...

"St. Valentine's Day Massacre

In
Chicago, gunmen in the suspected employment of organized-crime
boss
Al Capone murder seven members of the George "Bugs"
Moran North Siders gang in a garage on North Clark Street. The
so-called St. Valentine's Day Massacre stirred a media storm
centered on Capone and his illegal Prohibition-era activities and
motivated federal authorities to redouble their efforts to find
evidence incriminating enough to take him off the streets."
More you may read on; www.history.com

His birth date and birthplace
are unknown. Valentine's name does not occur in the earliest list
of Roman martyrs, which was compiled by the Chronographer of 354.

The feast of St. Valentine was
first decreed in 496 by Pope
Gelasius I, who included Valentine among those "... whose
names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known
only to God." As Gelasius implied, nothing is known about the
lives of any of these martyrs.

Various dates are given for
their martyrdoms: 269, 270, or 273.
The name was a popular one in late antiquity and is derived from valens,
(worthy).
Several emperors and a pope
bore the name, not to mention a powerful gnostic teacher of the
second century, Valentinius,
for a time drawing a threateningly large following.

That the creation of the feast
for such dimly conceived figures may have been an attempt to
supersede the pagan holiday of Lupercalia
that was still being celebrated in fifth-century Rome, on February
15 is apparently a figment of the English eighteenth-century
antiquarian Alban
Butler, embellished by Francis Douce, as Jack Oruch
conclusively demonstrated in 1981. Many of the current legends
that characterize Saint Valentine were invented in the fourteenth
century in England,
notably by Geoffrey
Chaucer and his circle, when the feast day of February
14 first became associated with romantic
love.